The Wildest Heart

by Rosemary Rogers

  I watched him snatch the yellow slicker down from its peg and throw it about his naked body. The door slammed behind him, and then there was only the sound of the rain and the rushing water and the crackling fire.

  I remember that I lay there, on the crumpled blankets, and I told myself that I hated him, and myself as well. I had asked for this, I had come here after him, flinging myself at his head. What else did I expect? He loved Elena, and how sure of him she had been! She knew Lucas, much better than I ever did or could. I had merely made myself available, and he had taken me, just as he had taken Flo Jeffords, just as he must have taken countless other women. I shuddered with revulsion, remembering how I had almost pleaded with him for some avowal of love, or real feeling.

  And then I told myself, stubbornly, that I was a Dangerfield, and I knew what I wanted. I would not give in! I wanted Lucas Cord, whatever he had been, whatever he was, whatever he had done. And I wouldn’t let Elena have him. I was stronger than she was, and younger, and we were both trapped here for the moment.

  I stood up, flinging the blankets away from me, and I went outside. The thunder growled menacingly, amidst the throaty roaring of the water and the ceaseless chatter of the rain. I gasped with shock and cold as gusts of wind drove the icy cold needles of water against my body, drenching me within a second. He was out here, with a wound that had barely begun to heal. I felt alone, and frightened. Suppose he had gone? Suppose he had some secret escape route known only to himself and he had decided to abandon me here? How long had he been gone? Where was he? I began to inch my way forward, feeling the driving rain like so many tiny icicles against my face and my unprotected body. I clung to the side of the house for support and for guidance in the pale gray light.

  “Lucas! Lucas, where are you?” I heard a pounding in my ears like a drumbeat and wondered why I was suddenly so terrified. “Lucas!” I blundered around the corner of the hut, and suddenly, thankfully, I felt his arms go around my waist as I almost barreled into him.

  “You! For Christ’s sake, what are you doing out here?” But even while his angry voice slashed at me, he was dragging me with him, and we staggered together into the slight shelter of the lean-to, where Diablo was munching on his feed, wet coat quivering.

  My teeth were chattering.

  “I thought… you took so damned long!”

  “Since when did you start swearing?”

  “Since—since whenever I please! I’ll swear when I feel like it! Damn you, damn you!”

  He shoved me up against the wall, pushing his face close to mine, his brows drawn together in a black frown. “You swear just once more an’ I’ll belt you across the face! What in hell gets in you sometimes? One moment you’re all soft and yielding, and the next you’re a wolf-bitch, all claws.”

  “I can’t help it! You make me that way! And you swear all the time…”

  “That’s different, I’m a man.”

  “Oh! Oh of all the… the…”

  “Why don’t you try shutting up?”

  He was as wet as I was. Water dripped from his hair and ran down his face. Even his lips were wet and cold.

  “Why did you come out here?” he whispered finally, raising his mouth a fraction from mine.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back. You were so angry when you just stamped out, leaving me!”

  “An’ how far did you think I could go? Even if I’d wanted to? You crazy female!” He kissed my half-formed, angry protest into extinction, leaving me out of breath.

  “There. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “Lucas…”

  “No. Don’t talk. Listen, I only stayed out here trying to fix up a better shelter for Diablo. Been meaning to do it before, only I kept putting it off. Even had the hammer an’ nails out here, and the boards. See? Everything’s wet, but that don’t make too much difference.”

  “And you chose to come out here in the middle of a storm to do it?”

  “You better get used to the fact that I aim to do as I please, anytime I damn well feel like it!”

  It was the closest he had come to commitment, and I stared at him.

  “Very well. And you had better accept the fact that I intend to be just as independent!”

  “I accepted that the first time I talked with you. Remember how mad you got? An’ then you came running after me like a fool, yelling out my name. Even then I didn’t know what to make of you. Still don’t. Look at you! Running out here in the rain, naked…”

  “Don’t you like me this way?” He was leaning over me, his hands on the muddy wall on either side of me, still wearing that ridiculous yellow slicker. Laughing up into his frowning face, I put my arms around his damp body, pressing my face against his chest. “I love your body,” I whispered. “And especially when you’re not wearing any clothes.”

  “You’re a shameless hussy!” I think he meant to sound angry, but his voice lacked conviction.

  “And you can’t hide the fact that you want me in spite of it!” I teased, and could almost have sworn that he reddened with embarrassment. He wasn’t used to teasing, nor given to easy laughter unless it was cynical or bitter. I had already discovered this. Perhaps it was because he had never had the chance to feel young and carefree.

  “I’ll be goddamned if you ain’t the boldest-tongued female I’ve ever come across!” he said threateningly, but when I slid my hand down his belly and touched him, I heard him catch his breath before he put his hands firmly on my shoulders and moved me aside.

  “If you’re goin’ to stay out here you can help me finish what I started out to do, or else go back in the cabin an’ stop distractin’ me!” His voice was harsh, and his narrow-eyed look warned me to silence, but I obeyed him meekly enough when I saw him shrug out of the slicker and toss it aside. “Damn thing just keeps gettin’ in the way, an’ I ain’t likely to get any wetter than I am now,” he grumbled, adding, when he saw my smile, “an’ I don’t want any smart comments out of you, either!”

  I picked up a board without speaking and held it for him to nail in place, knowing better than to offer to do the hammering myself, in spite of the grim-lipped, drawn look that came to his face when he had to use his right arm.

  He was stubborn, almost as stubborn as I was myself. I remembered the time when I had thought of him only as a dark, brooding, and completely ruthless man—an outlaw and a murderer who deserved to be hunted down. I remembered the sickened feeling that had taken hold of me when I learned he was not Elena Kordes’s true son, but her lover, and the anger and disgust I had felt afterward should have warned me of the inexplicable, unforeseen involvement of my emotions. But how could I have been prepared when I had never felt such emotions before? All I could be sure of was that Lucas had uncovered some need in me I had not known existed.

  I watched him furtively as he worked with an angry concentration, blinking drops of water from my lashes whenever a gust of wind brought the rain slashing against my face. I had not thought a man’s body could be beautiful until I had known his. But even the scars that my viciously raking nails and Ramon’s knife had left, or the soaked, bloody bandage that showed whitely against his brown skin, could detract from the almost perfect symmetry of flesh and muscle and sinew. I was suddenly seized with a wild and unreasonable surge of jealousy. How could any woman not want such a man? How many women had he wanted, and taken?

  He looked up suddenly, tawny-green eyes meeting mine, and something passed between us. He put down the hammer and the box of nails and took me by the arm.

  “I think we’re both crazy, stayin’ out here in this when there’s a fire in the cabin and warm blankets to lay on.”

  Water dripped from our bodies and made puddles on the cabin floor. My teeth chattered, and even my face felt numb. But when I made a move to take up the shirt I had discarded earlier, to dry my hair, he pulled me down with him onto the blanket by the fire.

  “The blankets will be soaked through! Lucas… wait!”

  “No!” h
e said it fiercely, savagely, his body already moving to claim mine. “I want you just the way you are now. Wet—your hair dripping. Cold outside and warm inside. Rain witch!”

  Twenty-Nine

  With the storm enclosing us, our loving was another kind of storm. I had never experienced such intensity of feeling, nor such a wanton abandonment to passion. Lucas possessed me, and I wanted to possess him. We gave each other, with our bodies, the commitment that neither of us dared put into words.

  We mated. There is no other word for it. We were equal—man and woman; neither asking what we could not give. And later, when the fury of passion had died away into peace and we were content to lie together, still part of each other, I remember thinking that whatever happened later I would always have something that could not be taken from me or lost. An unchangeable moment, encapsulated in time.

  We slept, with nothing but the hot, harsh glow of the fire to cover our naked bodies. And when I woke first, I lay still, not wanting to disturb his exhausted sleep; content to lie there and savor the pleasure and pressure of his hard-muscled body on mine. How well I had learned to know his body! I was as familiar with it now as I was with my own. Untaught, I had nevertheless learned how to excite it. I knew the feel and taste and touch of him; I had mapped every scar, every inch of his flesh with my hands and searching lips, as he had done mine. Was it really possible that I was the same woman they had called the marble goddess? With all my learning, and the rational, practical mind I had prided myself upon, how had I failed to recognize that such depths of passion and feeling existed? If, after our first joining, I had still had some stubborn, secret barriers left, they had disappeared now. Why had I kept trying to evade the truth? I was in love with Lucas Cord—shamelessly, recklessly in love, for the first time in my life; and the knowledge left me strangely weak and helpless. Why did it have to be Lucas, of all men? Why not Todd, whose very persistence and self-assurance had brought me close to a kind of loving; why not Mark, who would never hurt me… or even Ramon?

  Lying there with my eyes staring into the orange glow of the fire and listening to Lucas’s deep, even breathing against my heart, I wondered how it would all end. I had asked him that earlier and he had refused to answer me. There were too many unanswered questions that tugged at my brain when I allowed myself to think. The world outside, which must, inevitably, claim us both again. Elena… oh, God, why must I keep thinking about Elena? I should be more concerned by everything I had learned about Lucas himself. I should have remembered before I came here what he was and what he had done.

  Deliberately, I thought of Elmer Bragg, shot from ambush and left to die. Todd Shannon, with the crimson patch of blood spreading, spreading on his white shirt as he lay in the dust. Flo, and what had happened to her. And all the others there must have been. I should have kept on hating and despising this same man in whose arms I now lay, but instead I found myself trapped by the call of my body and my senses, and I knew that against all reason I loved him and would continue to love him. I didn’t care what crimes he had committed. If only I could stay with him, things would change, I would make them change! Lucas loved me—he had to love me. A man’s body cannot lie…

  He will not lie to me. I should have asked him before. So many questions, and yet I knew, without any pangs of shame, that no matter what answers he gave me, I was unalterably committed to him. Since we had quarreled our relationship had changed and I was more sure of myself, and of him. Start with the past, I told myself. I was still to afraid to question what the future might hold.

  I suppose I must have stirred uneasily, for suddenly I found myself looking into Lucas’s sleepy, half-closed eyes. “Are you always such a damn restless sleeper? What’s the matter with you—hungry again?”

  “Only curious. About something I should have asked before. Your grandfather told me to, but I…”

  I felt the wary stiffening of his muscles and rushed on.

  “Lucas—will you tell me about Elmer Bragg? The marshal in Silver City said…”

  “I know what they all said. An’ thought.” I held my breath, releasing it only when I heard him give a long sigh. “All right, Ro. I guess you need to know. Been wonderin’ if you’d ever get around to askin’—and then I figured that if your mind was already made up there was no point in my tryin’ to change it. But no matter how it seemed, I didn’t bushwhack him, Ro. Didn’t even hear what had happened, until afterward.”

  I said nothing, taking comfort from the fact that his arms continued to hold me as he went on, in a quiet, voice: “I was in jail, a small town in the province of Sonora, when he found me, and God knows how he did that I’d gotten into some kind of trouble up there, and they said they were goin’ to let me rot in jail until I could pay the fine they named, or work it off. Mexican jails ain’t the healthiest in the world, and I had a hunch, besides, that they were just aimin’ to keep me there until the damn alcalde got to checkin’ across the border on how much reward money was bein’ offered for my hide. An’ then Bragg turned up. I hadn’t seen him since my trial in Socorro; he was the last man I expected to see, and I thought, at first, that Shannon had hired him to find me. Until he started talking about you. About how you’d come all the way from England to claim your pa’s share of the ranch, and had hired him to find out all he could. Said there were things he didn’t know or wasn’t certain of that I could tell you, that you needed all the help an’ advice you could get, an’ it was up to me to make sure you heard both sides of the story. An’ all the time he was talkin’ he had this kind of secret grin on his face, like he had somethin’ up his sleeve. When he told me I’d probably find meetin’ you a real nice surprise I remember he laughed out loud. It made me mad. I told him I didn’t trust him, that I thought he was loco, but that old cuss was always the persistent kind. We argued back an’ forth, an’ he kept remindin’ me I didn’t have much choice. He’d arrange to bust me out of jail if I gave him a promise I’d go see you an’ talk to you. An’ to tell the truth…” Lucas grimaced ruefully, “by then I’d started to thinkin’ of what would most likely happen to me when some of Shannon’s bounty hunters found where I was, and I wasn’t of no mind to find out. So Bragg and I made a bargain, and that same night I was loose. I guess he bribed a guard—never did find out, because he’d gone already. I was free, I had a horse and a gun, and I rode like hell until I’d crossed the border.”

  I believed him. God knows I had wanted to believe him in the first place, but now, meeting Lucas’s steady expressionless eyes, all my instincts told me that he had spoken the truth.

  “But Lucas, then who…”

  “You think I haven’t asked myself that too? Or why he kept callin’ my name? Mebbe he was tryin’ to warn me, mebbe it was just because I was the last one he talked to. Hell, mebbe he thought it was me, who knows? But it could have been anyone, Ro. That part of the world is the perfect hideout for outlaws, bandits—the thing that surprised me was that Bragg would have been careful, he knew the country, an’ the risks.”

  We looked at each other, and suddenly, in spite of the fire’s heat, I shivered.

  “You think it was someone he knew?”

  “Or thought he knew, maybe. I don’t know! An’ if half the Rurales an’ lawmen on both sides of the border weren’t lookin’ for me, I’d have gone back to that convent where he was at an’ done some checking on my own.”

  “Was? Oh Lucas, he’s not…”

  “Don’t know that either. All I know is what Flo told me.”

  “Flo…”

  He must have seen my face change, and sensed my instinctive movement of revulsion, for his arms tightened inexorably about me, holding me still.

  “You knew damn well I was meeting Flo! An’ I’m sure you guessed she was tellin’ me things.”

  “You used her!” Why did he have to mention Flo?

  “Yes, I did, an’ I ain’t goin’ to make no excuses for it, Ro. I had a score to settle, and I went about settling it my way. Flo was unfinished business
, an’ when I came back an’ heard she had left her rich husband an’ was staying with her pa again, askin’ questions about me—hell, all I could think of was the way she’d lied that time, sayin’ I tried to rape her, when all the time she… all right, so she was only fifteen—that’s what you were goin’ to say, wasn’t it? But she was a woman to look at, and she knew all of a woman’s cheating, teasing tricks. Sure, I was goin’ to use Flo if I had to. Give her back some of her own medicine, an’ get back at Shannon too. You guessed that, didn’t you? That first night I talked to you, you flung that at me.”

  “Why did you come? You were free, you need not have let your promise hold you when you had other things to do.”

  I tried to keep my voice even, but it shook traitorously. Oh, God, why did this man have such an effect on me? Even when he admitted how cold-bloodedly and calculatingly he’d taken advantage of Flo’s weak nature, I could not escape my own longing for him.

  “If I make a promise, I try to keep it if I can. Although there were times when you made me wish I’d told Bragg to go to hell. Do you realize that ever since I ran into you, you’ve brought me nothin’ but trouble?”

  “Oh! Of all the unfair… if you hadn’t come to Silver City to kill Todd—”

  “Wrong again. I came to Silver City to bring Ramon, so he could meet you. An’ then all hell broke loose.”

  “But you had been with Flo! Oh, God… even now it makes me sick to think of it. After Todd was shot and I came up to find her, the bed was—and then she admitted it. She told me she’d been with you, that in spite of all the danger you couldn’t stand to stay away from her.” I would have pulled away from him then, if he had let me. The memory of Flo, the thought that they must have lain together, just like this were almost too much to bear thinking of.

  “Damn you, Ro. You wanted answers from me, didn’t you? I don’t know what kind of story Flo made up—it sounds like the kind of thing she’d say, I guess. But if you’re tryin’ to say I went to bed with Flo, screwed her, and then walked over to the window and shot Shannon, you’re… What kind of idiot do you take me for? Christ, Silver City was crawlin’ with lawmen and Shannon’s gunslingers, and no matter how I’d have liked to get a shot at Shannon, I wasn’t aimin’ to get shot by his men before I got close enough. I talked to Flo, sure, but I wasn’t about to get myself trapped in bed in a hotel room with her. An’ if you want the truth, I didn’t even trust her that much. No, it wasn’t me took that shot at Todd Shannon. I was headed out of town when it happened, an’ I kept goin’ when I heard. I wasn’t the only one hated the bastard. Anyone could have done it, and then, if they knew I was in town, pinned it on me. If I hadn’t have talked to Ramon and decided to get the hell out right then, they’d have had me trapped, an’ no one, not even you, would have taken the time to ask me any questions.”